Depleted cores, multi-component fits, and structural parameter relations for luminous early-type galaxies

Abstract: New surface brightness profiles from 26 early-type galaxies with partially depleted cores have been extracted from the full radial extent of HST images, giving us a total sample of 31 such core-Sersic galaxies. We have carefully quantified the radial stellar distributions of the elliptical galaxies using the core-Sersic model whereas for the lenticular galaxies a core-Sersic bulge plus an exponential disc model gives the best representation. We additionally caution about the excessive use of multiple Sersic functions for decomposing galaxies and compare with past fits in the literature. The structural parameters obtained from our fitted models are in general, in good agreement with our initial study using radially limited (R < 10") profiles, and are used here to update several galaxy scaling relations. We find near-linear relations between the break radius R_b and the spheroid luminosity L such that R_b ~ L^1.13 +/- 0.13, and with the supermassive black hole mass M_BH such that R_b ~ M_BH^0.83+/- 0.21. This is internally consistent with the notion that major, dry mergers add the stellar and black hole mass in equal proportion, i.e., M_BH ~ L. In addition, we observe a linear relation R_b ~ R_e^0.98 +/- 0.15 for the core-Sersic elliptical galaxies, where R_e is the galaxies' effective half light radii, which is collectively consistent with the approximately-linear, bright-end of the curved L-R_e relation. Finally, we measure accurate stellar mass deficits M_def that are in general 0.5-4 M_BH, and we identify two galaxies (NGC 1399, NGC 5061) that, due to their high M_def/M_BH ratio, may have experienced oscillatory core-passage by a kicked black hole. The galaxy scaling relations and stellar mass deficits favor core-Sersic galaxy formation through a few `dry' major merger events involving supermassive black holes such that M_def ~ M_BH^3.70 +/- 0.76, for M_BH > 2 X 10^8 M_sun.